AI SEO · Answer Engine Optimisation
Your customers have started asking ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews and Perplexity for “the best plumber near me” or “a good aesthetics clinic in town”. Those answers name a handful of businesses. Our job is to make sure yours is one of them.
Let’s discuss it for your business →
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Answer Engine Optimisation is exactly what it sounds like: optimising your business to be the answer, not just a link. When someone asks an AI assistant a question with buying intent, the assistant composes a short answer and recommends a few specific businesses. There’s no page two.
Those recommendations aren’t random. AI systems lean on the same underlying signals as search, but they weight them differently: structured data they can parse, consistent information about your business across the web, genuinely useful content that answers real questions, and the reviews and mentions that prove you’re legitimate.
You’ll hear this called AI SEO, AEO or GEO (generative engine optimisation). The label doesn’t matter. What matters is that the businesses who get their entity data and answer-ready content in shape now are the ones the assistants will keep recommending.
The good news for local businesses: this is a game you can win. AI answers about “near me” questions draw heavily on local signals you can control, your Google Business Profile, your reviews, your service pages, your consistency.
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Entity building: making sure search engines and AI systems understand exactly who you are, what you do and where you do it, with rigorous JSON-LD schema markup across your whole site, from your organisation and services to your FAQs and reviews policy.
Answer-ready content: we research the actual questions your customers ask assistants and build clear, quotable answers into your pages, the kind of passages AI systems lift into their responses.
Consistency engineering: AI systems cross-reference. We make your name, address, phone, hours and service claims identical across your site, Google Business Profile, directories and citations, so there’s nothing to doubt.
Machine-readable access: we keep your site fast, crawlable and open to the crawlers that feed AI answers, with the technical touches (like llms.txt and clean semantic markup) that make you easy to cite.
And because it’s us: no black-box mystique. You’ll see what we changed, why, and what the assistants are saying about you in plain monthly reporting.
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Yes, and that’s the point: AEO isn’t a replacement for local SEO, it’s the same foundations pushed further. The map pack still takes the click for a huge share of local searches, and the signals that rank you there are the same signals AI systems trust.
That’s why we run them as one campaign, not two invoices. Pillars one to three get you found on Google today; pillar four makes sure you’re still the answer as search shifts into assistants.
If you already rank well locally, you’re closer than you think, and if you don’t, AEO is the excuse to finally fix the foundations properly.
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Nothing extra. AEO is part of the £350 per month local SEO campaign, not a separate line on the invoice.
Starting price Included in local SEO, from £350 per month
That is a deliberate decision rather than a discount. The work that makes an AI assistant confident enough to recommend you, a clean entity, consistent details across every platform, structured data, real reviews and content written to be quoted, is the same work that earns a map pack position. Splitting it into two products would mean charging you twice for one job and doing both of them worse.
So there is no AEO upsell here, and if an agency is quoting you a separate monthly for “AI optimisation” on top of your SEO, it is worth asking exactly which tasks are in one and not the other.
Drawn out
An assistant does not browse your site while it answers. It answers from what it can already verify about you, so these two plates are the whole job: the sources it reads, and what makes a passage of yours worth quoting.
The granular stuff
Straight answers
AEO is the work of getting your business named in the answer an AI assistant gives, rather than just ranking on a page of links. When someone asks ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity, Claude or Gemini for a recommendation, the assistant writes a short answer and names a handful of businesses. AEO is everything that makes yours one of them: a clean, consistent entity, structured data an assistant can parse, genuinely useful content written so it can be quoted, and the reviews and mentions that prove you are real.
In practice, yes. AI SEO, AEO and GEO (generative engine optimisation) are three labels for the same job: being the business an AI system recommends. The terminology is still settling and different people use different words for it. We use AEO because the goal is to be the answer. What matters is the work, not the acronym.
No. It extends it. The map pack still takes the click for a very large share of local searches, and the signals that rank you there, an accurate Google Business Profile, consistent details, real reviews and useful content, are the same ones AI systems lean on. That is exactly why we run them as one campaign rather than selling them as two products. If you already rank well locally you are closer to being AI-visible than you think.
They cross-reference. A model composing a local recommendation draws on what it can find and verify about you: your Google Business Profile, your website's structured data, your reviews, directory listings, and mentions on sources it considers reliable. Contradictions hurt you. If your hours differ between your site and your profile, or your service list does not match what your pages say, that is a reason to name someone else instead.
No, and anyone who guarantees it is guessing. These systems are probabilistic, they change without notice, and answers vary between users and phrasings. What can be done is to make your business the easiest possible one to verify, quote and recommend, and to monitor what the assistants actually say about you month to month so the work is directed at real gaps rather than assumptions.
By asking. We run a consistent set of the questions your customers would actually type into the major assistants, record who gets named and how you are described, and track that over time alongside the underlying signals we are improving. It is not a tidy single number like a ranking position, and we would rather show you the actual answers than invent a score.
With us it is not priced separately. AEO is part of the local SEO campaign, which starts at £350 per month, because the work that gets you recommended by an assistant is the same work that gets you into the map pack. Where you should be careful is with agencies selling “AI optimisation” as an extra monthly on top of SEO. Ask which specific tasks sit in one and not the other, and see whether the answer holds up.
Small local businesses are often better placed than large ones. AI answers to “near me” style questions lean heavily on local signals that a small business can genuinely control: a complete profile, real reviews from real customers, clear service pages, consistent details. You are not competing with a national brand's budget, you are competing with the other businesses in your postcode, and most of them have not done any of this.
It is a plain text file at the root of a website that summarises what the business is and does, in a form built for the crawlers that feed AI answers rather than for people. It is not an official standard and it is not a magic switch. It is a cheap, sensible way to hand an assistant a clean summary instead of making it infer one, and it is part of what we set up. Ours is at localterritory.com/llms.txt if you want to see what one looks like.
Next step
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